Why build vs buy decisions get harder the longer you wait
1 May 2026
0 min read
For more insights on this webinar, read the blog post.
Internal IT builds rarely die in dramatic fashion. They erode quietly, accumulating maintenance hours, workarounds, and single points of failure until the team realizes it's spending half a working day patching something that should have been replaced years ago. According to Exclaimer's research, 71% of in-house tools eventually get abandoned. Most of the cost is paid before that point, in the years of upkeep that nobody costed in.
In this on-demand session, Karl Bagci, Director of IT and Information Security at Exclaimer, sits down with Jeff Grettler, Head Brand Ambassador and Content Creator at Spiceworks Ziff Davis, to walk through what he calls the reversibility curve. Early build decisions are cheap to reverse. The longer a tool runs in production, the more dependencies it accrues, and the harder it becomes to replace.
Karl draws on his own experience leading IT at multiple organizations, plus findings from a survey of more than 2,000 IT and security leaders, to explain why most build vs buy debates miss the real cost. The conversation covers the hidden time tax of internal tools, the accountability gap that opens up when an engineer leaves, and how vibe coding and low-code platforms are pushing the curve into new territory.
The session is built for IT leaders, technical decision-makers, and anyone responsible for making the case to non-technical leadership when an internal build needs to come off the books.
Watch on demand to see why timing, not preference, is the question that decides build vs buy.
Key takeaways
The reversibility curve in practice. Why early build decisions are cheap to reverse, and why the cost of changing course rises sharply as a tool embeds itself in the business.
The hidden cost of internal builds. Exclaimer's research shows 63% of IT and security leaders spend 10 to 50 hours a month maintaining self-built tools, with two thirds spending $20,000 to $100,000 a year on maintenance alone. None of those numbers tend to make the original business case.
The people risk no one writes down. Why ownership and accountability matter more than most teams treat them, and how a single engineer leaving can turn a working tool into a future problem.
Vibe coding and the new build vs buy calculus. How AI-assisted development has lowered the barrier to building, widened the gap between people who can build and people who know what good looks like, and what to do about it before shadow AI becomes shadow IT at scale.
